Tris McCall is the lead singer and guitarist of New England band The Favorite Color. Prior to the release of their first album (about which there will be more in the next issue), he released a brilliant solo acoustic album of his own, THE BROKEN LOOM. It was so brilliant, in fact, that i was COMPELLED to speak him, as you can see below....

WATCHING THE CLOCK WITH TRIS McCALL:

DA: So what does a "standard issue boy" do when he's not holding a guitar?

TM: If you're talking about this standard-issue boy, lemme tell ya: not much. I'm one of those terribly annoying guys who's always playing the guitar, thinking about music, listening to records, planning on making new records and playing shows... I never get out. It's sick, really it is. See, that's why I'm so pale. People think I'm a consumptive, like a 19th century storybook artist. I guess it does sort of go with my personality. But really, I'm obsessed with music to an unfathomable degree. Unless the Yankees are playing a big game. In that case, I'm taking the phone off the hook.

DA: How were you drawn to this business of making music in the first place?

TM: When I was up at school, an older kid -- actually a drummer -- kind of recruited me to join his band. He was a really rich kid, and I think that he was attracted to the fact that I had travelled around a lot. Anyway, he insisted that I write the lyrics to his songs. I think he wanted something gritty and urban. He had seen too many dopey movies.

Halfway through our "collaboration", he decided that since apartheid was ending, that the big new thing in pop music was going to be the African sound. By this point he was really getting on my nerves. He was asking me to write lyrics about Africa and human freedom. The fun had gotten out of hand. I told him that I couldn't do that, he got frustrated, and moved to California to make synthesizer pop. I really have no idea what happened to him; I hope he's not responsible for the music to those mulitcultural Coca- Cola commercials.

But, see, the funny thing is, once you start writing music, you can't stop. No matter how frustrated you might get with audiences, or with how bad you are, or how silly the whole entertainment "industry" is, once the creative process of songwriting begins, you can't shut it off. There's this whole myth intact that the artist is a producer, and the audience is a consumer, and that they live in a kind of symbiotic relationship. But even a cursory look at the New York club scene and all the rockers playing empty clubs gives the lie to this. Writing, especially songwriting, isn't a productive activity, like coal mining or baking Wonder bread. It's more of a compulsion, like biting your nails.

DA: What frustrates you most about the music biz... or the world, for that matter?

TM: My biggest frustration with the record industry is this overwhelming fallacy, often mouthed but infrequently acted upon, that the most important element in rock songwriting, for selling records, is the melody. Nobody wants to agree with me about this, but it really seems indisputable to me that it's the lyrics that sell records. Billy Corgan says "despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage." That, to me, is fucking brilliant. Not because it's so profound (it certainly isn't) but because every 15 year old in the country, no matter how sophisticated they are, is going to hear that and respond in some way. Some of them are going to put their fists up in the air, some of them are going to scoff, but it'll reach all of them. Kurt Cobain mumbled a lot of his lyrics, but the ones you heard were killer slogans. "Here we are now -- entertain us," everybody heard that.

Every song on the radio right now is an anthem. "Alternative" performers have learned from rappers that the quickest way to listeners' hearts is to assertively sloganeer at them. The ones who most effectively and unambiguously sum up their positions in their lyrics (Courtney Love, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails) will be the ones who make the most impact. Everybody else is just The Posies (which is certainly not a bad thing, just a difficult one to find a market for).

If it was really true that melodic hooks sold records, Matthew Sweet would be -- hell, Game Theory would be the biggest act in the country.

DA: "hands like cool water" reminds me of Don McLean for some inexplicable reason... is that just me or what?

TM: MacLean was not a city performer, and I think of "Hands Like Cool Water" as a very urban song. Then again, it's difficult to suggest the inner city when you've only got an acoustic guitar. People associate the acoustic guitar -- particularily the sound of the Martin -- with the country, and for good reason.

You could trace the musical ideas in "Hands Like Cool Water" through Lyle Lovett's JOSHUA JUDGES RUTH (its most apparent immediate source) to country-influenced seventies singer/songwriters like MacLean, Joe South, John Prine... to John Denver before them, to the Buffalo Springfield, the Lovin' Spoonful and other country rockers in the late sixties, through The Byrds' entire catalog, and ultimately back to the Irish and Scottish ballads that Roger McGuinn interpreted so gracefully. "Originality" in pop music is one of the silliest notions going. I give myself writing credit for that song, but its real author is that first Irish troubador or bard who discovered that dropping the bass note under an open A-chord sounded cool.

DA: You seem somewhat worried about time. What gives?

TM: I'd like to take this opportunity to quote Zooey Glass: "every time you turn around, the goddamn sands run out on you."

And also Scott Miller: "Tell me life is short/ And don't explain a thing/ I would never ask you more."

And also Roger Waters: "And then one day you find/ Ten years have gone behind you/ No one told you when to run/ You missed the starting gun."

And John Cougar: "Hold on to sixteen as long as you can."

And William Shakespeare: "In delay there lies no plenty/ Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty/ Youth's a stuff shall not endure."

DA: A question within a quote: "...do you believe in rock and roll and can music save your mortal soul?"

TM: Absolutely. Love can save your mortal soul, too, but rock and roll is a safer bet.

The funny thing about listening to "American Pie" now is how incongruous the references to the Rolling Stones now seem. I mean, no matter how well they play, the Rolling Stones have always seemed to me to be a bunch of innocuous older dudes jumping around. I totally believe McLean's reaction to them -- I'm not about to doubt that his "hands were clenched in fists of rage," especially when he sings it with such naked vitriol -- but I cannot imagine what it must have been like to experience their music as a "Satan's spell."

The Steel Wheels tour may have been many things, but it was no Satan's spell. I mean, that is some serious respect. Ozzy Osbourne had to bite the head off of a bat to get that kind of respect.

DA: I am now going to demonstrate my ignorance by asking: who exactly IS Lucien Bouchard and why is he apparently a bad guy?

TM: Bouchard is the Quebecois separatist leader. The disc was duplicated in French Canada, a few days after the referendum narrowly failed, and I had a paranoid fantasy that the French-speaking duplicators were about to destroy my dirty American DAT to take their revenge.

I am opposed to separatist movements on principle, but by no means do you want to get me started on politics.

DA: What's the inspiration behind "fifth beatle"? sounds like there might be an interesting story there....

TM: It's funny you say that. Everybody I know thinks that that song is about them. That's how I know it's pretty good. If you write a song, and everybody who hears it thinks it's about them, you know you've probably done something right.

It's actually about a girl who meant a lot to me when I was in junior high school. She was totally different from all the other kids; she was a really good writer, she had an unprecedented... audacity that was really appealing. And then, just about overnight, she totally lost it. She just became like everybody else, she started having the same opinions everybody else did. I think she ended up in law school, too. That was my first experience of somebody growing up and completely losing their personality. And it was the most traumatic, too, because I had never had that happen to me before. I mean, she said she was going to be a revolutionary when she grew up. I believed her. And then I just felt cheap for finding her so different and so exciting.

So about half of the song is aimed at her. The other half is more generally aimed. All the lines could just as easily apply to me. Usually, when I perform it, I don't think about her, I think about me. Me on a bad day; a front-page story looking for a cheap press.

Songwriting is like trying to hit a target with a dart. The more you aim, the tougher it is to hit the target. That song was just knocked off; it's a knock-off of Camper Van Beethoven's "Shut Us Down," which is itself a knock-off of about five million other songs. But I think it's as close to the bulls-eye as I've ever come, so I appreciate you singling it out for attention.

DA: It seems like there's a certain kind of innocence on the album that's missing in a lot of music these days... any thoughts on this observation?

TM: I learned to sing from listening to Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs records, so there's always going to be a certain "angelic" quality to my vocals, for better or for worse. I really have no idea how grunge singers get the vocal sounds they do. [DA: They drink too much bad coffee.] I wouldn't know where to begin if I wanted to try to sing like Greg Dulli. It would be nice, I guess, to be able to sound a bit more sinister, but I've tried it, and it doesn't work for me. It isn't much of a problem on THE BROKEN LOOM, but during the recording of the The Favorite Color album, there was frequently a need to compete with swirling stacks of amplification. I do my best, but I don't want to be the Vanilla Ice of "Alternative" music.

For whatever reason, audiences seem to currently be responding to husky, testosterone-soaked male vocals. This has been a drag for me, since I'd much rather listen to someone like Tim Finn than grunge singers. The flip side of this phenomenon, of course, is that there are now tons of baby-voiced female singers who project a kind of childlike image as a part of their sex appeal: Bjork, Jewel, Shannon Worl, Dar Williams, so many others who take their cues from early Rickie Lee Jones albums. The same innocence which makes these singers attractive is unbecoming when "put on" by a male vocalist. My guess is that this is a temporary condition, and that a whole lot of junior Nick Drakes of my generation, raised on androgynous early-eighties crooners, are about to spill out into the musical mainstream. But for a couple of years there, 1994 in particular, it seemed inconcievable that a mass audience could be satisfied by my choir- boy vocals.

Actually, that's when (and why) I wrote "X Marks The Spot," the third song on THE BROKEN LOOM. It was a can't-beat-'em join-'em attempt to do the kind of gritty grunge song that I kept seeing on MTV. Originally, I conceived the song as an instant Stone Temple Pilots classic; you know, really slow, brooding and dangerous. When I recorded the vocal, I tried to sound all grimy; I remember trying to hold a mental picture of the waiting room at CBGB. Ultimately, my singing on that song was compared to Art Garfunkel, so you see how successful my attempts to sound "hard" are.

DA: So have you begun doing those dreaded acoustic gigs behind the album yet? :)

TM: We played one acoustic show, but it was as The Favorite Color. We did it at the CBGB Gallery, which is right next to CBGB. I think it's probably the best venue in New York City to play right now. During set breaks, the DJ plays the albums of bands that are regulars there.

DA: Wwhat's the status of your full-time occupation with The Favorite Color (including the new album)?

TM: By the time this interview is printed, the album will be out. We're trying to get somebody to distribute the record, but we haven't yet, so the best way to get a copy is to get in touch with me. I'm hoping that, despite the full rock arrangements, everybody who liked THE BROKEN LOOM will like this record, too.

DA: I see in the liner notes the phrase "no federal goons will come after you if you duplicate it without authorization." may i assume then that you think the whole home-taping panic is a bunch of bushwa?

TM: Well, it goes deeper than that for me. I'm turned off by the whole notion of copyrighting a song. Because, see, when you copyright music, what are you copyrighting? You're defining music by its fixed elements, like chords, notes, and words, rather than its mutable elements, like atmosphere, sound, and performance. You can't get a performance down on a piece of paper, and seal it in a bank vault, so it's legally worthless in a rights infringement suit. But I will take atmosphere, sound, and performance any day over notes and chords, and I think any other serious music listener would, too. Good songs are a dime a dozen. Everybody has some good songs.

And all of those good songs, those songs are rewrites of other good songs which preceded them. And that's okay, that's the way music is supposed to be. But since copyright law, and therefore the record industry, assigns value only to the notes and the chords, a whole cult of the song- writer has sprung up. The songwriter becomes more important that the singer, the drummer, the producer, you name it. And why? Because the songwriter is the person who owns the basic unit of music industry value: the notes, words, and chords of the song. He or she ultimately will get all the money. Listeners buy into this game by accepting and reinforcing the notion that originality is of supreme importance -- but originality is totally illusory. All of the chord progressions and note sequences we know and love have been written a thousand times before. It's much more valuable to pioneer a new sound than to write a new song, but the record industry won't reward the sound. They'll only reward the song.

The fact that we even believe in the existence of a "songwriter" for any given song is testament to the fact that this poison has worked. We are unconsciously buying into a value system wholly determined by market conditions and contract law.

DA: Rock and roll gets mentioned a lot on the album... what exactly IS rock and roll, from where you stand?

TM: Rock and roll is a name given to a particular relationship to the backbeat, just like funk is a beat, and disco is a beat, and country and western is a beat. Rock and roll goes boom-BAP boom-BAP boom-BAP. You can do this without a drummer; Robyn Hitchcock does it all the time on his solo records.

The thing that makes the rock beat so cool is that it simulates both the experience of walking forward and the trajectory of the second hand across the face of the clock. It combines the urgency of forward motion with the certainty of the passage of time. This is why rock and roll will never die. Unless human beings become immortal, the rock beat will always speak to people.

Older people stop listening to rock and roll because as they age, the passage of time begins to really frighten them. They make up all sorts of excuses about how the music has changed, it's all noise, blah, blah, blah. Really, they're just way too afraid of the clock to listen for three and a half minutes to the second hand ticking.

DA: What do you think is killing rock and roll these days?

TM: If rock and roll isn't quite as good now as it used to be, it's probably because there are less kids. It's no great coincidence that the sixties, the greatest period of rock music, was also the period where there were more young people in America at any time before or since.

I'm also very skeptical of digital supremacy. (Of course, I'm the biggest hypocrite in the world, because both THE BROKEN LOOM and COLOR OUT OF SPACE-- the upcoming The Favorite Color album -- are available only on CD). It's so corny and cliched to say that vinyl has a warmth that's missing from compact disc, but it's totally true. BLONDE ON BLONDE sounds absolutely awesome coming through the speaker of a Fisher Price record player. It doesn't sound good, but there's an immediacy that's undeniable. On compact disc, it just sounds like a collection of songs. I'm not an engineer, so I can't begin to speculate why this is. I just know it's true.

DA: Is there anything more important than rock and roll?

TM: I would have to say that there is nothing more essential to the experience of being alive than art, and rock and roll is the best art form we have. But if I went around saying things like that all the time, somebody would have to smack me up a little.

DA: Last, but possibly most important: what kind of cookies would you prefer to be fed?

TM: If you have a refrigerator, I'd ask you to refrigerate those Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies. They're awesome. If not, anything by Pepperidge Farm will do. I am also partial to table water crackers and whole wheat biscuits from Carr's. I am a very bland boy. But I like all cookies!